A10 Thunder Kubernetes Connector vs Kusk Gateway

A10 Thunder Kubernetes Connector (TKC) monitors Kubernetes application lifecycles and updates an external Thunder ADC load balancer to route traffic. Running inside a Kubernetes cluster, it identifies a web service’s NodePort and dynamically configures Thunder ADC to load-balance traffic to Kubernetes nodes, avoiding manual network-resource provisioning. A10 describes TKC for multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud deployments, where Thunder ADC can apply consistent security and business policies across public and private clouds. Centralized traffic routing provides operations teams with application traffic and analytics visibility for troubleshooting. TKC supports Terraform and Ansible for CI/CD integration and is listed as an automated Kubernetes service-discovery option. Related Thunder ADC capabilities include Layer 4–7 load balancing, customizable health checks, aFleX scripting, TLS/SSL offloading, rate limiting and a web application firewall. TKC v2.4.2 is documented for Linux, self-hosted deployments using the ingress API model.

Kusk Gateway is a Kubernetes API gateway powered by Envoy, with native OpenAPI support. It uses OpenAPI definitions to configure a cluster's Ingress Controller, making it relevant to teams following an OpenAPI-first workflow for REST APIs. It can mock API responses for prototyping and automatically validate requests and responses. Teams can set request timeouts and CORS without coding, and adjust headers, CORS, limits, and quality of service globally or for individual paths.

An open-source dashboard supports API deployment and management, specification editing and validation, and API testing. The maker says an API can be published by adding an annotation to a service deployment, without additional configuration or DevOps support. Kusk can be installed on Mac, Linux, or Windows and is self-hosted. The project is 100% open source under the MIT License, with rate limiting and authentication policies listed. The maker presents it for teams building modern REST APIs on Kubernetes.